Halo film director speaks
On the Chief, Covenant, more.
Newly announced Halo film director Neill Blomkamp has spoken out about how he's approaching the film's coveted source material, and about his views on Halo in general.
Speaking to film website Ain't It Cool News, Blomkamp said - naturally - that he was a massive fan of both Halo titles, but that he prefers Halo 1 from "a conceptual and story perspective".
It also sounds like the Chief will be a mixture of a man-in-a-suit and computer-generated visuals. "The film has to have a feeling of reality, and so that means that I want to keep him real as much as I can," he said, but there's going to be a need for some CG.
He also explained that while he wants to be as faithful as possible to the source material, he obviously wants to film to stand on its own - and in some senses it's impossible to maintain complete loyalty to the pixels and polygons.
"Master Chief is certainly something that I do not want to change too much at all, there are certain things inside the Halo universe that are sacred and he's the main one," he said of the game's hero.
"Having said that, there is a need to revise certain parts of him, just from a purely technical standpoint, he has to actually be able to move, like a human, and the game design right now does not allow for full motion freedom, which we will have to achieve."
The same applies to the Covenant, he said - "the most important thing is that viewer thinks they are looking at something that lives and breathes".
"From an organic standpoint they have to be believable, they also need to be terrifying, and alien, and the best way to start doing that is to break that human silhouette, although many of them are bipedal anatomically, you can still shift the overall body to be something very alien."
Blomkamp's also a huge fan of the Flood, he says, and he's been very impressed so far with Peter Jackson's input as executive producer and the work Weta has done on preparing Halo for the big screen.
For more of his views on the film, which is due out in summer 2008, check out the full interview.